To disable themes systemwide call EnableThemes with it’s only parameter set to FALSE, be careful! you won’t be able to enable it back unless you belong to the TCB(Trusted computing base) group, SE_TCB_PRIVILEGE.

EnableThemes( FALSE ); // No more theming

Another way to disable theming for an application is to right click on the exe goto properties->Compatibility->Disable visual Themes. See this screenshot…

You’ve got some other options too on this page which you should try out. Useful to do some “minor” OS simulation work.

Interesting stuff

Another interesting thing to do is, you’ve noticed that msdev/VS6 doesn’t use XP themes so just rename YourAppName.exe.manifest to msdev.exe.manifest and paste in the msdev.exe parent folder. Restart msdev and see the difference, do the same with visual sourcesafe or any other application that doesn’t support xp themes. Have fun! 🙂

Note

Just incase you don’t have the manifest file with you, search in MSDN with RT_MANIFEST as key. Copy and paste the XML text that you see on the page to the manifest that’s mentioned above.